


(Nothing's Gonna) Change The Way I Feel

by prouvairablehulk



Category: King Falls AM (Podcast)
Genre: Developing Friendships, Multi, mixtapes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-08
Updated: 2019-03-08
Packaged: 2019-11-14 01:28:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18042863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prouvairablehulk/pseuds/prouvairablehulk
Summary: In which Ben finds a use for the station tape recorder





	(Nothing's Gonna) Change The Way I Feel

Track One: 27 - Fall Out Boy

 

Sammy goes on runs. 

It’s not really what Ben would have expected, with the limited interactions they’ve had so far, but Sammy “This Is More Sugar Than Coffee By Weight” Stevens goes on regular midnight runs before their show starts. Every night. 

They don’t usually talk about it - Sammy arrives freshly showered and not so twitchy he seems like he’s going to vibrate through the desk at any given moment - not that you could ever tell from his voice. Ben smiles as he sits, and the show starts with Sammy’s wet hair leaving neat, perfectly circular droplets on the black leather seat behind him. 

This stays the same for weeks, Sammy and his wet hair, Ben and his not asking any questions. 

It only changes when Sammy leaves his phone on the desk while going to get his first cup of coffee for the night. It lights up with a CNN alert while Sammy’s gone, and with the ad running in the background Ben has enough presence of mind to note that there’s a Spotify screen still open, and it’s paused precisely one minute and seventeen seconds into 27 by Fall Out Boy. 

It doesn’t take long after that for Ben to start dropping some hints about shared musical tastes, and that seems to resolve itself into Sammy wearing faded tour t shirts to work. Some of them fit him well, but others are clearly far too big for him. Sammy wears those tucked into his jeans, with the sleeves cuffs so they sit halfway up his biceps. Ben wonders where he got them - if they were second-hand, inherited from a friend, or if Sammy was late to the merch table and only the bigger sizes were left. The second option is ruled out the first time Sammy wears one that is a duplicate of one that fit him. 

Ben never asks who Sammy got them from, mostly because every time he thinks to do it, the first line of 27 rings out in his head. 

If home is where the heart is then we’re both just fucked

Whatever prompted Sammy to move to King Falls, to take the job, it wasn’t worth their developing friendship to push it, especially if the reason had anything to do with the t shirts Sammy swam in on the days when the bags under his eyes were worse than normal. 

 

Track 2: You, Me, Dancing - Los Campensinos

 

“You had a shitty day, huh?” says Sammy, as they finish the show. 

Ben rolls his eyes, but he’s now accustomed enough to Sammy’s Dad-Friend-ing to know that he’s not getting out of answering this. 

He nods, rather than saying anything.

“I get it. It sucks.” Sammy rolls his shoulders back, and grabs his car keys out of his jacket pocket. “Come back to mine this morning, yeah?”

Ben follows Sammy down the mountain, the sun lancing across the road in too-sharp beams as it rises. The sharp tang of a pot of better-than-station-breakroom coffee is already floating through Sammy’s half empty apartment when Ben climbs the stairs and lets himself in. Sammy’s got his back to him when he enters, bent over the crates that hold his ridiculous hipster record collection. 

“Help yourself to the coffee. You know where the mugs are, right?” Sammy says, without turning around. 

“Yeah.” says Ben, turning to the studio kitchen and helping himself to a black mug with a fern painted on it with chipping silver paint and filling it with the light roast Sammy preferred. 

“I had a friend -” Sammy says, still fiddling with the record player, “who swore by this as the best way to shake yourself out of a slump. And it always worked for me, so I’m passing it on to you.” 

The record he puts on starts slow, so slow. Ben’s confused for a good 30 seconds before the discordance cuts out and the real beat starts up. It’s infectious, the kind of thing that makes you tap your toes before you even really know what you’re doing. Sammy, who had up until that point been studying Ben’s face intently, starts to bounce in place, a smile breaking out across his face. Ben’s too confused to mimic it, even when Sammy bounces his way over to him, takes the mug of coffee out of his hand and puts it down on a still-not-unpacked moving box, and takes both Ben’s hands in his, pulling him to into the middle of the otherwise empty living room before dropping Ben’s hands and dancing like a fool in the middle of the patch of sun in the middle of the floor. 

The same smile grows over Ben’s own face as he joins in, and the chorus is easy enough to pick up, that before he knows it they’re both yelling it at the top of their lungs, laughing, every time it comes on. When the song ends, and they’re collapsed on Sammy’s terribly sagging second-hand sofa, laughing, Ben turns to Sammy and smiles. 

“Thanks.” he says, as seriously as he can manage. 

“No problem. He - my friend - I think he would have liked that I was passing it on.”

Ben doesn’t register that Sammy used the past tense until he’s back at his own place, falling asleep, almost three hours later. 

 

Track 3: Jackie and Wilson - Hozier

 

Summer in King Falls isn’t always swelteringly hot, and sometimes after they finish the show Ben drives the terrible second-hand pickup he’s driven since high school to the edge of the lake, and he and Sammy eat a picnic breakfast they’d pick up from Rose’s while sitting in the bed of the truck. Sometimes it would be in silence, just enjoying the warmth of the morning and the way the sun sparkled off the ripples of the water. Sometimes they’d talk about nothing, sometimes about anything, sometimes about things they’d done in college that they regretted, or didn’t regret, or made them laugh. Sometimes they’d leave the doors of the truck open and use the speakers to boost music off one of their phones through the bluetooth plugin Ben bought. 

Sammy’s the one to put on Hozier, one morning, and he sits with his knees folded and his back pressed against the window of the cab, eyes only half-focused on the horizon line as the opening chords of Jackie and Wilson drift out into the morning. Sammy’s fingers bounce against his knees in time with the strum pattern, and Ben wonders if he’d ever played guitar. 

“I played guitar, once upon a time.” Sammy says, unprompted, as the song ends. “Maybe I should pick it up again.”

“Why not?” says Ben. 

Sammy smiles faintly, smiles at nothing, eyes still unfocused. 

“Why not?” he repeats. 

Ben doesn’t ask about the guitar he sees propped in the back corner of Sammy’s living room the next time he hosts a Buffy rewatch, or when the case makes an appearance in the backseat of Sammy’s car, nor when it becomes a fixture in the backseat of Sammy’s car. 

He never hears Sammy playing it, but there are calluses on the fingers of Sammy’s left hand that didn’t use to be there, and a copy of Hozier’s album joins Sammy’s record collection. Sometimes, Ben catches him humming the chord progression while he mixes the sugar into his coffee in the breakroom, and Ben thinks of the way Sammy’s eyes had unfocused in the bed of his truck when the sun was flickering off the water and the humidity of the day hadn’t settled in yet. 

 

Track 4: Pompeii - Bastille

 

After the disaster of an interview with Lily Wright, Sammy sits in his car in the parking lot of the station, using the bluetooth capabilities of his ridiculous big-city car to blast Bastille until he sees her and her producer leave. The doors are unlocked, so Ben opens the passenger side and slides in. 

“Wanna talk about what that was?” he asks, because he thinks they’ve got to that point. 

“No.” says Sammy, predictably. 

“Are you sure?” asks Ben. 

“Absolutely.” says Sammy. 

“Wanna talk about the music instead?” Ben offers. 

“Sure.” says Sammy, in a tone of voice clearly meant to translate as ‘not even remotely’. Ben’s not going to go anywhere, though, not after the way Sammy had reacted to Lily. 

“You know, it sounds like they’re singing ‘eheu’.” Ben tells Sammy. Sammy isn’t making eye contact at all, instead staring resolutely out the windscreen at the blank wall of the station. 

After a moment of silence, Ben continues. 

“That’s a Latin exclamation. It means ‘oh no’, or ‘alas’. Which is kind of appropriate, you know?”

Sammy’s lip twitches, like he’s trying not to smile. 

Ben does smile. 

“I did Latin at high school, you know.” he says. “We learnt out of this textbook that was called ‘Look, the Romans!’, which gives you a pretty good idea of the content.”

He’s about halfway through the story of how many chapters the family that the textbook was written about spent with their carriage stuck in a ditch the first time Sammy snickers. By the time Ben is confessing his very straight laced Latin teacher had given him a detention for saying “the goddamn ditch’, Sammy is outright laughing. 

Ben feels like he’s accomplished something, and like maybe, just maybe, there’s something big and dark lurking just over Sammy’s shoulder that Ben is only just beginning to glimpse.

 

Track 5: Cut To The Feeling - Carly Rae Jepsen

 

Ben’s mom insists on extending an invitation to Thanksgiving Dinner to Sammy, which Sammy accepts with some reluctance. 

“I’m terrible at meeting families.” he says, as though he has some kind of experience with it. Ben supposes he must. Someone as great as Sammy has probably met a couple of families of significant others. 

“Relax,” Ben tells him, clapping him on the shoulder, “just bring a bottle of wine and enjoy yourself. I like you, so my mom will like you.”

Sammy looks vaguely like someone killed his dog, but he shows up to Ben’s mom’s at one thirty in the afternoon in a button down and the first pair of jeans Ben’s seen him wear that don’t have holes in the knees. 

He offers to help in the kitchen as soon as he walks in the door, and Ben’s mom actually takes him up on it. Ben, on the other hand, is swept away into a crowd of relatives from his mom’s side who all want to talk about the show, about Emily, about everything that has happened. Ben’s stuck reliving one of the worst nights of his life for what feels like hours but might be minutes, until the flow of people rotates in such a way that he can escape into the relative safety of the kitchen. 

What meets his eyes is so unexpected that Ben momentarily wonders if he’s hallucinating due to the stress of the conversations he has just escaped. Sammy Stevens is currently dancing Ben’s mom around the kitchen to that goddamned overplayed Carly Rae Jepsen song that was always on the radio that past summer, a huge smile on his face, while the turkey cooked in the oven, everything in the kitchen comfortably under control for the first thanksgiving Ben can remember. 

If Sammy wasn’t his brother before, he certainly was now. Ben’s mom wouldn’t hear of anything else. They head home at almost midnight, loaded down with leftovers, and Sammy grins at him over the roof of his car as Ben gets into his own. 

“Thanks for the invite.” he says. 

“You’re never going to be allowed to miss another holiday after this.” says Ben. Sammy shrugs. 

“Maybe that’s a good thing.”

 

Track 6: My Shot - Hamilton OBC

 

King Falls certainly isn’t immune to the obsession with Hamilton that sweeps the nation, as Jacob and Pearl Williams evidenced. Ben, and his internet-delivered shirt, are more visible in their appreciation than some. Sammy cracks up the first time Ben shows up to work with “young scrappy and hungry” plastered across his chest, but shows up in his own “rise up” shirt eventually, and Ben knows that Immigrants (We Get The Job Done) makes it on to his running playlist - friends don’t just not follow friend’s Spotify accounts. 

They reference it in the show when they can - it’s a friendly competition at this point, who can sneak in a reference in the most subtle way. Ben’s ahead, most of the time, but only because Sammy’s really good at quoting lyrics in such a deadpan way that it doesn’t register that he’s done it until Ben’s checking that the recordings play back. 

They get drunk for Ben’s birthday, at Ben’s apartment, after they leave the lovely dinner Ben’s mom prepared. Sammy’s present had been several bottles of better-than-the-boxed-shit wine, some kind of cake that Ben has never heard of but that Sammy insists they’re going to be eating for breakfast the next morning, and a USB with a bootleg on it, and Ben plans to capitalize on all three as soon as possible. 

He doesn’t remember much after they opened the second bottle. 

When they wake up at noon the next day, at noon, after they’ve both staggered to the kitchen and Ben’s taken up residence on the floor in front of the oven, after Sammy makes them coffee and pulls the cake out of the fridge and the only two forks out of Ben’s cutlery drawer, after Ben finds out that the cake is in fact a cake-sized meringue and also manna from heaven, after Sammy has spent five minutes with his head in the fridge looking for the left over whipped cream and the two of them have eaten the whole bowl off their fingers while deciding to rewatch the bootleg at a time when they’ll remember it, Ben looks at his phone. 

There’s a new video in his photo library, shaky footage of him and Sammy trying to do all the parts to My Shot while so drunk that neither of them can actually stand or enunciate their words properly. 

Ben saves it to as many backups as he possibly can, so that he never forgets again. 

 

Track 7: Demons - Frank Turner

 

Sammy tells Ben they’re going on a road trip to LA out of the blue one day. No, literally out of the blue. He shows up at Ben’s door at 2 in the afternoon and says ‘get in the car we’re going to LA’. 

It’s for a concert, Ben discovers. Sammy’s been dying to see whoever it is live for years, apparently, but they were English and rarely performed in the US. It takes 20 minutes on the highway for Ben to learn this. At the first rest stop, when Ben insists he needs coffee if he’s to stay awake for a concert, Sammy hikes up his shirt to show the left side of his ribcage while they’re standing in line at Starbucks. 

There’s two lines of cursive script inked along the point at which Sammy runs out of ribs, and Ben has to squint to read them. 

You’re not delivering a perfect body to the grave, time is not meant to be saved. 

“It’s from one of his songs.” Sammy says, letting the hem of his shirt fall again. 

Ben insists on playing the “This Is” Spotify playlist for the remainder of their trip, so that he knows what he’s getting into. There’s a lot of fantastic political polemics, some magnificently cynical love songs, and some that are softer. There’s some that are melancholy, some that are hard-edged, some that hurt to hear with the depth of their emotion. 

Ben understands why Sammy loves it. 

Sammy looks at home in the crowd on the floor, in his fleece-lined denim jacket and ripped jeans and Docs, yelling lyrics until he’s hoarse. Ben sticks to his side and lets the energy of live music flow over him. When it ends, when the floor is tacky with spilled beer and Sammy’s cheeks are flushed with exertion from singing and dancing, when they’re stumbling back to the car, high on the experience, Ben’s glad he dropped everything to come. Ben’s always going to be glad for Sammy, always going to be thankful to the universe for throwing them together.

The song that Sammy’s tattoo derives from is called Demons. When he finds out that Sammy went out to the Devil’s Doorstep, when he’s stuck listening to his best friend risk his life, when Sammy finally tells Ben and Lily what happened, it is somehow all Ben can think about. Sammy and his demons, so perpetual that they seem to share the ink on his skin.

 

Track 8: The District Sleeps Alone - The Postal Service

 

After that night, after Frickard, after it all, after Sammy falls apart, after Ben understands - after it all, Sammy disappears behind the door of his apartment and doesn’t come out - no pun intended. Ben is at Rose’s, picking up commiseration food to try and bribe Sammy into letting him in, when he runs into Ron. 

“How’s he doing?” Ron asks, elbows on Rose’s counter and a mug of coffee clutched in his hands. 

“He’s been playing the same song on repeat for the last two days.” Ben says, honestly. He knows, because he’s spent most of those two days with his back to Sammy’s door, listening to it, pleading for Sammy to let him in. 

“What song?” asks Ron. 

“The District Sleeps Alone. The original, too, not the Frank cover.” 

Ron winces, and pulls out his wallet, following Ben out to the carpark and then back to Sammy’s. 

When they’re outside the door, when the sound of The Postal Service claiming that they understand why they were the one worth leaving is audible again, Ron takes the bag and knocks on the door. 

“Sammy? It’s Ron. And Ben. We brought food, do you think you could let us in?” 

There’s no response. 

“I’m sorry that it happened this way. I know how horrible it feels to lose control of this.”

There’s a very faint sound.

“Please let us help with that, Sammy.” says Ron.

The door opens, but Sammy isn’t behind it. 

Scratch that, Sammy is behind it, but he’s on the floor, eyes red-rimmed, still wearing the same clothes he had been that night. 

“Let us help.” Ron says, again. 

“Fine.” says Sammy, voice rough with disuse. 

Ben wants to cry. 

 

Track 9: Feeling Good - Nina Simone

 

It takes two days after he moves in for Sammy to take over Ben’s kitchen. He does so with a lecture on nutritional values and the unceremonious burning of every takeout menu Ben owns, and then sweeps in like he’s always been there. Suddenly, there are overnight oats in their fridge and Sammy, half bent over the stove while beautiful aromas drift through the apartment. Sammy is more adventurous in the kitchen that Ben might have expected, fond of playing with spices and textures and flavors. He’ll happily spend hours cutting and slicing and simmering and sauteing and tasting. 

Two weeks in, he starts humming. Three days later, he starts singing. 

He’s making a rather indulgent dinner for the two of them, a risotto he’s been tending for about an hour with frankly decadent smelling vegetables, and he’s currently chopping parsley to top the risotto with. He hasn’t looked up in about twenty minutes, and Ben’s pretty sure that Sammy’s forgotten that Ben’s in the room. It starts soft enough that Ben wonders if they’ve left a window open and there’s someone on the street outside singing, but it slowly gathers volume. 

Sammy has a lovely voice, throaty and pleasant, and he sounds lovely singing the slow jazz he seems to have chosen. It’s not the first thing Ben would have expected to hear his best friend singing, but he’s glad it is. The apartment is filled with the hazy gold of the setting autumn sun, and Ben is on the couch, with his feet up, on his way to asleep under a heavy tartan throw that Sammy finally unpacked from a carboard box covered in coffee rings Ben’s pretty sure he had contributed to, that smells like a cologne Sammy doesn’t wear, and his best friend is in the kitchen singing Nina Simone. 

“It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, it’s a new life, for me.” sings Sammy, and Ben smiles, almost as hard as he did when Sammy had said ‘our town’ live on air. 

He snapchats a video of the trees swaying outside the living room window to Emily, making sure that Sammy’s singing is audible, and then puts his phone down, closes his eyes, and listens. 

 

Track 10: Mixtape 2003 - The Academic 

 

In advance of the first New Year’s Day after Ben learned about Jack - after fucking Frickard - Ben uses the tape deck he’d borrowed-slash-stolen from the station before the fire and spends a night with Emily and Spotify, bent over the pause, play and record buttons, so worn with use that the paint is entirely worn off. There’s a few false starts, as both he and Emily get used to technology that neither of them had ever really had reason to utilize, but it turns out in the end. 

Emily writes the track listing on the case, because she can make her handwriting far more legible at the small size necessary than Ben ever could, and Ben doodles an old-school radio-cassette player, or maybe a boombox, to be the cover, and they wrap it up in black paper that Ben misuses library resources in the form of metallic gel pens he hasn’t seen since all the girls needed a set in grade school to doodle silver ferns all over. 

They take it and the cassette player into Ben and Sammy’s living room - now converted into the biggest blanket fort they could make with Ben’s bargain IKEA furniture, supplemented with quilts from Ben’s mom, who adored Sammy in a way that made Ben think she’s decided Sammy is an honorary Arnold and that Sammy’s going to be shoved in the backseat if there’s ever an Arnold family reunion. Emily’s strung the place with fairy lights, and they’ve made tea with honey and copious amounts of popcorn - on the stove, the way Sammy likes it. Sammy’s wearing what Ben now knows is Jack’s old club rugby jersey, when he emerges from his room around dinner time, swimming in it as he always does in what Ben now knows are Jack’s shirts, were always Jack’s shirts, from the old pop-punk tour shirts, to the All Blacks stuff, to the college athletics shirts. 

It makes Sammy smile, all of it, and he looks like he might cry when Ben presses the wrapped tape into his hands, and he unwraps it. He smiles soft when he reads the tracklist, connecting each song to the moment that they shared that was related to it, until he reaches the last one, track ten. 

“I don’t remember -” he starts. 

“You haven’t heard it yet.” Ben tells him. 

Sammy hands the tape back, and Ben slots it in, presses the player closed, presses the worn-down button so that the song starts. 

Sammy snickers at the line about skinny jeans and roll ups, and then understanding flashes behind his eyes when the chorus starts up. 

“Is that how it is?” he asks, when the tape clicks off and the song is over.

“That’s how it is.” says Ben.

Sammy smiles, and lets Ben and Emily wrap their arms around him from either side and start up the first season of Buffy on Ben’s laptop. 

Emily falls asleep sometime around Spike crashing into the Sunnydale sign, and between that and Buffy finding her Halloween costume, so does Ben. 

The last thing Ben remembers is Sammy kissing his forehead, and saying something. He’s not sure if he remembers it right, but he thinks he does. 

_You two would have liked each other._


End file.
